The reference to Girl Guides clued me in that this was most likely not coming from a U.S. institution so I checked the sender's address and discovered that Curator is at a Heritage Site in Alberta, Canada.  

I don't think the U.S. copyright law or the Copyright Office here would be a particularly good authority for a Canadian collection.  Under U.S. law you could claim an exemption because you're preserving the original item by scanning.  Then you can make the scans available to onsite users without risking further deterioration of the original.  Assuming Canadian law is roughly analagous to U.S. law, you'd need to identify and make a good faith effort to contact the original photographers before publishing them, putting the scans on a website or granting others permission to use them.  

Most archivists would join me in encouraging Curator to save the originals if at all possible because of the context the collection provides (something scans cannot do) and the possibility that a better quality image will be needed at some point in the future.    

I'd suggest Curator look for listservs or websites of the Canadian Museums Association, the Canadian Library Association and the Canadian Association of Archivists and post the question there, unless some kind folks on this list have information about Canadian copyright laws that they can share.


Judy Turner
Whitefish Bay, WI

Blogging at: http://alms-jact.blogspot.com/
and
http://judyct.wordpress.com/ 

"The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." - Mark Twain in a letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888


      

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